quarta-feira, novembro 30, 2016

“’There’s a problem
with time and I don’t know how to explain it to you.’” (*repeated several times*)

In “The Gradual” by Christopher Priest

I just put down the book. Blew my mind. I'm
kind of seeing things at the moment…

When Phil Dick died only Christopher Priest
remained to explore similar themes. Despite exploring similar literary veins, Priest
was always less concerned with the trappings of the SF genre than Dick was. Anyone seriously interested in SF for grown-ups should read him in his own right. I’ve said elsewhere that if I’m a fan of any
genre, it’d have to be SF. It’s my first love, and it’ll always remain so. When
I was a young SF-neophyte and I discovered Phil Dick, I felt that my kind of soul had
made contact with his work. It was a very defining experience, and it felt like
it was innate. It’s hard to explain my feelings at the time. For me, that
experience was absolutely bound up in finding these books that were dealing
with the nature of reality and of what makes us authentic humans. Phil Dick
always maintained that the bombardment of the so-called pseudo-realities began
to produce make-believe and spurious humans very quickly — as fake as Lady Gaga.
I was used to the Asimovs, Heinleins, and Clarkes, which were more
run-of-the-mill SF. When I came across the Phil Dick oeuvre it almost seemed
they were a sort of fictional artifacts. I couldn't believe there was such a
writer working in the field of SF. I still remember thinking his name seemed
weird or that his titles seemed nonsensical to me. It was like a secret reality
unraveling in my life. As you can imagine my poor brain had to cope those
strange things coming out of Phil Dick’s pen. Priest’s books have a similar
effect on me. But because I’m “more mature and wiser”, the impact is not in the
same order of magnitude when compared to Phil’s books. Nevertheless, in
Priest’s take on the nature of reality, there‘s also something about the
essence of his writing that creates that feeling. I still think there‘s something
innately self-deprecating about the writing. His run-of-the-mill sentences make
you feel like I‘m the only one who understands what he’s writing, and he‘s also
the only one who understands me. It‘s like a cognitive version of a love
affair. I’m making this cozy connection with this other mind. He’s able to
project that into his work (see my review of "The Adjacent"). I think that Priest sees the
inner workings of our own reality we experience so profoundly. And this speaks
to the different layers of reality in his work — the way time moves according
to the calendar, but other ways in terms of ship time (mental time, psychological
time, social time):

Absolute age, travel
through the gradual: the difference led to personal rejuvenation gained.”

Looking closely at the above quote, I can see
the way Priest conveys the experience of the mind-altering or the
reality-transforming better than nearly any writer who ever lived, with the possible exception of Phil Dick. Priest’s prose is so plain that by that same plainness
he’s able to turn things into a sort of a hidden reality. His characters — his surrogates
within the space of his own fictional world — are totally incorporated in it.
There‘s no mastery exhibited. It’s all so very plain as to be awkward, but we
can sense the way the character’s experience it. They‘re not objective tour
guides. His characters are sufferers who move through these worlds/realities.

For many years, while I was reading Phil Dick
by the bucket load, I was also thinking about what made Dick so compelling and
personal, i.e., what made me each time take him so personally when I discovered
his work. And the same happens now with Christopher Priest. That’s the magic of the
great writers. They make us believe in their unique creations.

This is not the best Priest has ever written, but if you want to see what literary SF looks like, look no further.

sábado, novembro 26, 2016

My idea of fun isn’t always fun for someone else. Listening to music, reading, playing/developing/creating games, exploring (scuba-diving, hiking, biking), and watching Shakespeare plays are just a few things that are fun in my book. I’m so glad I live in the 21st century, because most of these activities can be done or extended by using current technology.

I love Android technology! If I had to save a few things in a fire, it'd be my Shakespeare library (some P. D. James as well, and a few others), my smartphone and tablet (my electronic content is already in the Cloud so I wouldn't have to worry about portable disks and my Synology Home Server), and a few other bits and bobs. This leads me to the question. Is programming Fun? It surely is! For those of you who have never written any code before, it really is delightful. I understand that “programming” can sound intimidating to someone who has never written a line of code before, but if you’re reading this post, then you’re probably pretty familiar with using modern devices, which means most of the hard learning is already done.

Why is programming fun is the follow-up question. Thinking about it I must say it's because of the absolute joy of creating things. I've always liked to tinker with computer stuff, as well as the fact I love to be always learning. Making things pleases my inventive leanings built deep within me.

When I was starting out in the 80s with my BBS, I couldn't imagine what would happen 20 years or thirty years later. If someone had handed the 12 year-old me a Samsung smartphone or a 10-inch tablet, I’d have assumed they were props from Star Trek. I can do literally everything with these magic little gadgets.

Google, Samsung, Apple have crammed so many amazing features into smartphones, and I can only marvel at the inventive things I can do with them. As someone who's always been interested in geeky stuff, the smartphone capabilities are without parallel in the computing world. Gone are the days when my only means of connecting with a computer were the keyboard and mouse. Cameras, microphones, touch screens, and motion sensors enable me to experience and do things on the smartphone and tablet that were pure SF before this past decade. Not only are they fun to use, but they’re so fun to tinker with! Anyone who enjoys taking apart and tweaking with stuff can appreciate the joy of understanding how a computer, smartphone, and tablet works and then bending them to do my will in new and creative ways.

With so many features packed into such a small device, it's easy to access the microphone and then transform sound and video clips that I store in my phone’s memory. Being a Maker I can hack away at my own game, adding motion and touch events like tilting the screen (like I did with this "Brick-a-Brack" game). It doesn’t have to be pretty or polished, either ("Brick-a-Brack" game is anything but that; if you try it you'll see why). Just getting my app to recognize a sideways movement and moving the paddle in one direction, then in the other, can be an amazingly fulfilling moment.

When I was coding for a living, some of my superman moments came at the end of a long period of time coping with a specific issue, finally being able to "see the light" that allowed me to connect to a Database server and successfully understanding the way a SQL statement was supposed to work or why a particular database was having performance problems in production.

When approaching
Shakespeare in the twenty-first century many writers make an attempt at
re-inventing the classical plays, updating the setting to a post-modern world
of chaos, smartphones, Facebook, and Google+. Relating the stories of
Shakespeare to the lives of people in 2016 can be utterly hectic to watch when
done well; we can feel an honest connection to the drama of the world of the
play when set in our everyday backdrop. But pitfalls come with re-imagining the
world of any Shakespeare play: if it’s not fully coherent then it’s just an
update for an update’s sake, not a new spin on the story to shine a new light
on it. There is a lot to be said for a way that modern readers connect to they
wouldn’t otherwise read in the first place. I find that particularly the
audio/visual differences should be quite significant when it comes to adapting
a play to a modern setting. If I were an actor, I think my performance of
Shakespeare would be quite different if I were living in Elizabethan times. I
feel the director (and the actor as well ), in modern day, should be responsible
for delivering archaic text so it could first be comprehended objectively by an
audience that weren’t used to listening, but without sacrificing truth to
character or believability, which are equally important to understanding a
story. I know that is my experience as a theatre goer. Sometimes I feel the
director and actors did a good job. Sometimes I don’t. At the end of the
day it often feels like an impossible task.

An attempt at retelling
a Shakespeare play must be daunting for a writer. And also for a reader. That’s
why, up until today, I always avoided reading Shakespeare retellings. But I
shouldn’t have any fear. Atwood is on the job. This rehash is anything but; it’s
filled with Atwood’s characteristic wit and play with language. She’s quite
unmatched when it comes to weave several threads into a cohesive whole. I never
thought she could pull this off, but she did. She exquisitely entwines the
language of Shakespeare into her tense and ever sparkling prose, making the
text take a life of its own. Only Atwood would be able to bring such exquisite
pleasure, when it comes to Shakespeare’s curses; they’re the only curse words
the prisoners are allowed to use; it’s an elated spree of Shakespeare’s language,
from insults like “whoreson” and “hag-seed” to enigmatic lines like “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”:

It's surely only
a matter of time before someone adapts it for the theatre. And it would make a
great play. I only wish the prisoners/actors were more fully fledged. As it is,
they’re merely ciphers, but I’m not sure it wasn’t intentional on Atwood’s
part. Despite its very minor shortcomings, I’m not embarrassed to say that I
did have a lump in my throat by the end of this retelling of the Tempest…

domingo, novembro 20, 2016

(NB: Sorry. I haven't been able to upload this to the Google Play Store. This is what I got in reply: "After review, Whack the Minion, has been suspended and removed from Google Play as a policy strike because it violates the impersonation policy." Damn the minion. I should have chosen "google, the minion moron" instead...)

NB: I didn't bother correcting the code indentations. Beware of attempting an implementation without that. On top of that, the above code implementation does not follow to the letter the app on the Google Play Store, meaning, the app on the google play store is not the latest version. I still have to update the app with the above-mentioned source code. One of these days...Or probably never...So much to do, so little time to do it...

NB2: App developed with Matilde's help, for our baby boy Manuel Maria. May he spend many happy hours whacking the minion...

sábado, novembro 19, 2016

Back in the day I did a year of French. My
teacher was a native speaker. You’d think that this would make her fun and
interesting, right? You couldn’t be more wrong! All she did was drill us on
grammar, and I couldn’t even understand what she was saying half the time. She
just expected me to automatically know the language as if I’d already lived in
France for years. I was always procrastinating doing French stuff, and she was
always expecting me to write and memorize a huge bunch of sentences in a language
that I hardly knew, and then repeat it back to her. She totally turned me off
to the French language. I started hating everything remotely connected with
French-speaking literature. I know not all French people are awful, cruel,
soulless people, and that most are friendly and completely normal, and that I
was just unlucky to have gotten stuck with the one person I’d be totally ok
with having deported… Just saying…I’m done ranting now…That felt good. This to
say that for many years I just couldn’t read French literature, because,
firstly, I didn’t know the language (I still don’t), and, secondly, because all
those painful memories kept coming back to me. It was so painful I asked my
father to write to the school to tell them I no longer wanted to attend French
classes and I wanted to switch to German, which I did. That’s why I never learned
French to this day…For many years I just couldn’t look at a book from a French
author. And then I came across “Dirty Snow”, my first “Roman Dur” by Simenon. My
first impression was: “I don’t want to
read this crap!” But my friend convinced me, and to this day I can't rave
about it enough--unputdownable—one my favourite settings ever--Nazi-occupied
France during World War II. One of my all-time favourite novels is also Camus' The
Stranger; the main character of “Dirty Snow” is somewhat reminiscent of
Mersault in “The Stranger”. “Dirty Snow” has the same existential flavour but
was a lot more gritty and ruthless yet at the end, remarkably introspective and
poignant for such a creepy character. That’s what clinched it for me. It made
Simenon's “romans dur” worth reading, much more than his Maigret novels. This discovery came at the right time. When I
was very young and still learning the ways of the world, I got disillusioned by
the meanness of that same world. Coming to terms with that ruthlessness was not
an easy task. Once in a while a particular turn of events could have turned me into bad
person, in a world where being good was sometimes a sin. Those were also the
days when I discovered the “Roman Durs” by Simenon for the first time. The
world started making sense through Simenon’s lenses. Only later I
became aware of the Maigret phenomenon, but they never did for me what the
“Roman Durs” did. I got hooked on him due to them and not the Maigret novels.
Of course, for many years I read many of the Maigret titles, probably not all.
I thought at the time the “roman durs” were far superior, if only because there was no necessity
of a 'mystery' to solve. A 'whodunnit' was not required. The sparse, somber
prose and the impression of everlasting dampness and everlasting dusk left me
with a very a strong impression.

This
leads us to the “Mahé Circle” which was the only “Roman Dur” I hadn’t read back in the day.
Now, at last, we have a translation in English. As soon as I got it, I got my
hands on it and I didn’t let go until the last page. This is one hell of a portrait
of a man whose “mittelmäßige Existenz”
is shattered by the realisation that there's something more to be had from life
than Sunday dinners with friends and a spot of fishing. While most of the plot, as it is, happens on
the island, much of the psychological drama takes place back at home. It's a place where the main protagonist,
François, should be in his element, an environment of his own, yet this simple
truth turns out to be an enormous lie. It's a book I enjoyed immensely. This
“proves” there’s more to Crime Fiction than meets the eye.

quinta-feira, novembro 17, 2016

The way I read the Jack Reacher novels is for
their underpants. Because Jack doesn't own clothes he isn't wearing, it means I
can know how long he's been wearing the same set of underpants. I’ve been told
he changes every three days, which to my way of thinking is still not often
enough, to say the least (I change them daily…lol), but in some of the novels
it's a lot, lot longer than that. I don’t know how the other characters don’t
notice this, or if they do, they’re afraid he’ll punch them in the face. If
underpants are a bit too intimate for you, we can do socks, and Jack does an
awful lot of running, jumping, falling. He must change them very often. And he
might carry a toothbrush but there's no dental floss or mouthwash, no deodorant
stick or spray. I think you'll find that about ten books ago he got a job
digging swimming pools. Off the top of my head I can't remember whether he used
a spade or just his bare hands. Or maybe his fold up toothbrush. And, yes, in
my mind, Jack Reacher's sweat always smells of Old Spice.

This latest novel is simply dreadful,
ludicrous, and fun at the same time. I’ve read almost all of Jack Reacher
novels. Some of them nearly have been good, some have been great. This one is
terribly sketchy and also with an implausible plot, a total lack of character
development, no pace, no excitement; it's as if Lee Child has just taken me for
granted. He's clearly resting on his royalty payments and having a laugh, at this
readers' expense. I don’t know how much I can take.

In almost every book he decides to have a
wander around the good ol' USA (this time the wandering is in Germany…), he
finds trouble, mean folk and many fights. As well as some poor innocent who
needs his help. Not to mention a beautiful woman who, lucky for him, usually
happens to find him very attractive, just to reassure us that he hasn't turned
gay without us noticing, or he stumbles upon some really nasty criminal
activity completely by accident, usually while getting tanked up on coffee, and
he meets a uniformed (police or ex-army) girl, and they have a shower in some
sleazy motel room and go to bed (this time this role falls on Neagley, and we
all know it won’t amount to anything). After that Reacher kills all of the bad
guys. The end. Formulaic in the extreme, but somehow comforting that this giant
of a man is looking after all of our interests.

I'll say nothing more, except this: The plot is
still deliciously ludicrous and we can also see Lee Child would still not be
able to recognise a metaphor if it walked up and punched him in the nuts.

Lee, wake up time. Some strong dissatisfaction,
despite all the fun with the plot... In truth, Reacher as a binge surfeits very
fast. He's a lot more appetizing once in a while, as a variant in the
thriller-suspense diet. This year this is my second Reacher. What am I to do???

quarta-feira, novembro 16, 2016

I am
writing this fiction for one reason and one reason only; angrykiller90210 said I
couldn't do it!

They said I
couldn't stick with anything. Well, this will be proof positive and it will be
awesome! I'll do this in 3 parts, below is just the intro which doesn't count
towards those 3. Like the Hobbit movie.

(btw, I'll
finish the last parts of my other Breaking Bad story later, btw.)

Seeya, From,

A Budding Author.

It was the
best of times, it was the worst of times...it was 6 o'clock.

Hi.

My name is
Ghost DarkmoonRaveny and this is my story.

A year ago
got a job working for TEDTALKS. I am just an intern, but I am already fitting
in like "one of the boys" (I am a girl though!)

In fact, my
boss, Steve, has taken a real shine to me and has said he will let me play
around with one of TEDTALKSs big things.

I can’t
wait!

Despite
working at TEDTALKS, I am also friends with Ninja Walter and most of his “entendrege.”
I know Ninja Walt and Ultimate DarkmoonRaveny and Ghost Marie and Pokemon Jesse
and Future Saul. I met them all a while ago in my backstory and these days I
had known them for other reasons.

I call on
them for help (or, more often, they call on me for help!) quite often.

By coincidence,
this was one of those times!

"Hay
Ghost DarkmoonRaveny we need the help of you and the TEDTALKS again"

"Sure
thing Ninja Walt my man you know you can count on the TEDTALKS!"

After that
I put down the phone and started telling everyone else what was up.

"Ok,
gang" I said to the rest of TEDTALKS.

"Ninja
Walter White has asked for our help. It seems Weyland-Yutani Corporation is up to
their old tricks, and we are the best people to take them down!"

"They
are after the Blue Meth, but we have to get there first else we are all doomed
to a hellish ‘futurpoclypse!’"

"What
do we do?" said TEDTALKS

"That's
easy. We do what the TEDTALKS always does - fight evil."

Now it was
tomorrow and I was assembling my team.

I first
choose Ninja Walter White, who I had called in specially as our outside expert.

I then
choose Ghost DarkmoonRaveny as they were good at stuff.

Also Bob
from our private army so we had someone disposable who wouldn't be needed in
future stories.

I also
choose myself, due to my all around abilities.

After
everyone was chosen and me and Ninja Walter started planning.

In the
planning room we evaluated the data we had.

"Ok,
we know that Weyland-Yutani Corporation is trying to find the Blue Meth. This
is probably so they can use it to dominate our friends and family"

"Now I
have called our friends at the NATO and they have narrowed the location of the
Blue Meth down to Avalon."

"Can’t
they do better than that?" said Ultimate DarkmoonRaveny

"No,
it’s only NATO""

"-sigh-stupid
NATO."

"yeah.
TEDTALKS has always to keep bailing NATO out of trouble..

"Well,
I guess we are off to Avalon!" said Ninja Walt.

So we all
leaped onto our TEDTALKS Teslas and went over there!

Once we got
there we found our worst fears had already come to pass; Weyland-Yutani
Corporation was already there. Weyland-Yutani Corporation petrol's were all
over the city, searching in every iggloo and warehouse.

"They
are looking for the Blue Meth!" said Steve.

"We
have to beat them too it!"

We began
sneakily and stealthy running around the city. Unlike Weyland-Yutani
Corporation, we had more information about where to look.

After a
period of time looking, and with Ninja Walts help, we found it before them.

"There
is it is! At least!" I said, pointing to the Blue Meth hidden by a weird skyscraper.

"So it
is" said Steve, suddenly grinning.

"I
guess then this charade is over!"

Steve
pulled of his mask and suddenly his face was Unicorn Todds!

I stood gob
smacked in the face.

"Yes,
that's right Ghost DarkmoonRaveny & Ninja Walter, it was me all along I,
Unicorn Todd was Steve the whole time!"

"I don't understand" said Ninja
Walt. "Why?"

"That's
easy. I knew I could never find the Blue Meth without your help, and I knew you
would never help me. So I became CEO of TEDTALKS, and employed Ghost
DarkmoonRaveny. After that it was simply a matter of earning your respect,
creating a threat and waiting for you to call Ninja Walt"

"Creating
a threat? You mean Weyland-Yutani Corporation?"

"Yes,
that's right! Weyland-Yutani Corporation is just a bunch of actors I hired. It
was all an elaborate set up to make you lead me to the Blue Meth"

"Gosh, how could we have been so
foolish" said Ninja Walt.

I was
frozen still. My life had been a lie. I had believed in the TEDTALKS. Believed
in what it stood for. Believed in the good work we did. But it was a lie. It
was all a front. It was Unicorn Todd all along.

I pressed
through the pain though. Maybe TEDTALKS was a lie, but that didn't mean its
cause was meaningless. It didn't mean I had to surrender, to give up.

"No. I
fight for TEDTALKS and I will never give up. Regardless of you, "Steve"
" (I said that last part sarcastically).

"That's
right" said Ninja Walt. "You might have fooled us. Made our lives a
lie and stood in front of our nose the whole time, but you can never take away
our spirit"

segunda-feira, novembro 14, 2016

Let me lower myself into the reviewing pit...
Dear Lord, this rope is slippery. Oooh, and it smells of poo down here… I dislike Amazon for its predatory ways (though I have a Kindle and buy
old-fashioned books and novellas there: yes, I'm a hypocrite...). In recent
years I've acquired a novella reading habit. I think with these shorter works
authors can be experimental and still keep the quality very high across the
whole piece. It's nice to see what a good author can do with a bit of freedom
and the stories are widely available without you having to subscribe to every
magazine going. If it weren’t for the Kindle I’d never have the chance to read all
those delicious novellas, particularly of the SF kind. I wish Muhammad N.
Sikandar well, though I'm not in his target audience and am unlikely to read
more of his books. I don’t believe for a minute it’s possible to publish
without writing a single word as Sikandar claims. When someone already has a
large number of texts already written it’s a different case altogether.
Probably Sikandar is filthy rich and is laughing all the way to the bank. On
top of that, he’s writing for a very large potential audience, and in a genre
that is currently probably the most popular - and therefore the most lucrative
- in non-fiction: self-help books and cooking…We all need help once in a while
and we also have to eat. What can I say? Sikandar has the skills to perform all aspects
of the task of bringing his books to the customer himself, but at the end of
the day he must write!!! I’m also quite flabbergasted he is able to write new
books at a speed that others will struggle to match. Alas, I’m not superman,
not even wonder-woman. How does he do it? After all is said and done, this is
only possible because Amazon made Sikandar's success possible. But Sikandar is only a tiny outlier. There are
enormous numbers of self-published authors on Amazon, and most of them sell
pretty much nothing and make pretty much nothing. Successes in self-publishing
are tiny compared to successes in traditional publishing. I'm not against
self-publishing. I’ve done it myself. But I only managed that by writing lots
of words...I think it's a great option for many people and many books. But too
much is made of the very, very few successes, and too little is mentioned about
the vast majority who don't ever come near to making what a newbie author would
through traditional publishing. What I especially like about the Kindle is that
it’s democratic. I’ve no longer to be bound by the nepotistic, backscratching
and incestuous literary establishment but can go out and find talented authors
for themselves. That’s why I bought myself a Kindle in 2009. It strikes me that
the market will take over as the gatekeepers - books that the mass market
decide are crap won't sell beyond the first few hundred or so, as there are
customer reviews in most e-book stores. All hail crowd-sourcing. I've read
plenty of dead tree books that may have been edited but should never have seen
the light of day. Until the advent of smartphones you couldn't easily get other
readers reviews whilst browsing in your local bookstore, so when buying a book
by an unfamiliar author you were always taking a chance. And once an author
does get established often their publishers will let them publish any crap they
like (e.g., Tom Clancy, Lee Child).

sexta-feira, novembro 11, 2016

“I learned to like the
music because I heard so much of it there, and because you could just about
taste the alcohol in every flatted fifth. Nowadays I go for the music, and what
I hear in the blue notes is not so much the booze as all the feelings the drink
used to mask.”

In the short-story “The Night and the
Music” from the collection “The Night and the Music”

Is that a fact only women read romance novels?
I don't buy it. The same way I don’t buy only men read Crime Fiction. If safely
exploring the brutal and violent world and the disproportionate threat women
apparently face is the motive, perusing academic journals and scientific
studies, even TV documentaries, makes more sense than reading stories and
literature that feature brutal violence. Is it possible that one of the reasons
women (and men for that matter) like reading about human violence and brutality
is that it fascinates and even in certain instances titillates? Romance novels
sell millions of copies - despite even its fans deriding the atrocious writing.
Are the novel's largely female readership using the books as an indirect tool
to make sense of (some) women's tendencies to be submissive sexually and
willingly degraded by a dominant male? I don't think so. I even conducted a
pool on my woman friends, and it’s a “fact”. They bought the book because the
content turned them on. I don’t think many people are able to deny this. Likewise,
readers of more brutal and violent works, (aka Crime Fiction and Horror)
generally read them because the subject matter fascinates or titillates and not
because they are conducting indirect sociological research into the nature of
rape, murder and violence. There is a genre in Manga (Japanese comics) that
features gay males violently raping and murdering each other. As everyone
knows, its readership is almost exclusively female (go and read the polls
available on the internet, if you doubt me). It is accepted, if still somewhat
taboo to mention, that many women and girls have rape fantasies and are
sexually excited by male-on-male violence, e.g., boxing, street fights
even though logically they abhor both rape and violence against males or
females. The internet world of fandom also reveals a side of female attitudes
towards sex and violence that surprises and disturbs me. I know I met
a few of them eons ago. The human mind is a strange and fascinating beast. That
which on one side repulses and frightens can on another side turn on and
arouse. Most women are not sexually aroused by reading about women being raped
and murdered (although some likely are) but to downplay the fascination
violence holds for women and men and claim that female readers of violent literature
are doing so primarily to make sense of human depravity doesn't make sense.

I try to analyze my own leanings in terms of
fiction, and I also like Crime Fiction. Why? As usual not sure. I think there is
something addictive about fear, about pushing your tolerance for darkness to
the limits and I also think this is true for many people - women and men.

But I have to admit, I do prefer it when the
female victims turn the tables on the attackers, having finally had enough of
all the torture and the rape and the violence, turns vigilante and embark on
some hatred-fueled murdering, killing all the fu#$%ers. The often contradictory
nature of human "nature" makes many people uncomfortable but there
you have it. We are a species with one foot rooted in the animal world (we are
mammals after all), and one foot stuck in the complex human-only world. Maybe neuroscience
could give us some answers. We’re just starting to get an empirical
understanding of how the human brain operates and reacts...there is no similar
tool that gives us a definitive understanding of the human mind and its many
complexities and contradictions. Art is in part an attempt by humans to make
sense of human's internal world - a world no scientific equipment can ever
measure.

I think that’s the reason we like art and
literature to make sense of the human world, but I don't think that is the
primary motive driving someone to read a certain genre or work of fiction. Block’s
“The Night and the Music” offers insight into, among other things, the nature
of guilt and how the human mind tries to rationalise committing a violent act
against innocent persons but I doubt most readers of this short-story
collection pick up the book with this at the forefront of their minds. I just
enjoyed it because I love Matt Scudder putting away all the bad guys in the
end, and sometimes with a vindictive streak to go along with it…

quarta-feira, novembro 09, 2016

(Image pilfered from the
Internet; if you own it, please contact me, and I’ll remove it)

Trump prove the
old saying that if you want to attract discerning flies then pass solid waste
in the marketplace. I propose that the Statue of Liberty can now be returned to
France as it is no longer of any cultural significance. Well, well, well...
congratulations, President and moron Trump. Congratulations, USA. What just
happened is very simple: The electoral majority just bought the course at the
Trump Universe for the entire country. Regardless of what people knew about it
- obviously, the alternative was even more unpalatable to them. Trump now has a
majority at congress - both house and senate. He has all it takes to make good
of his long litany of promises of what he will do to "make America great
again". I am sure that it will prove to be very instructive.

Dear victorious
Trump voters: You have exercised your democratic right to choose. Celebrate
your victory with glee and delight, and feel free to bayonet the injured
vanquished. You definitely showed us. Drink the delicious liberal tears
tonight. Feel free to project all your hopes and expectations of salvation on
the Don, assured that everything will be all right now. Just don't forget why
you did what you did when it becomes evident that you are just like the people
inhabiting the Trump's Weltanschauung. So now, starting January, all of us will see how
Trump will tear up the trade agreements. How he will keep you safe from islamite
terror. How he will destroy terrorist cells. How he will fix Iraq, Syria and
Libya. How he will bring manufacturing back to America, undoubtedly starting
with his own products. How he will build the beautiful wall on the Mexican
border with Mexican money. How he will fix the American deficit by cutting
taxes and making business explode. How he will repeal Obamacare and fix the
American health system. How he will change the dystopia of black/latino city
centers into a bright new morning. How he will protect cops and citizens alike.
And all the other nice things he promised.

In a nutshell,
how to make America great again.

Right?

This is what the
Americans bought. Regardless of what the American voters knew beforehand. I
don't want to hear any complaints from them once we learn that winning an
electoral majority does not mean to get what you were promised. Ask the
British about the Brexit. They’ve began to learn this already.

(Image pilfered from the Internet; if you own it, please contact me, and I’ll remove it)

Now is not the
time to be polite or equivocate. Conservatives with a small 'C' are racists
with a small 'R' - they won't march, they won't protest against the changes
that happened to their cities, towns and villages. They are classic cowards -
they just want to be able to walk around the streets where they grew up and see
less foreign faces or hear only American accents. They want someone else to 'fix
this' for them. Despite all the equality and diversity, we have in schools and
colleges, it turns out that the insidious racism learnt on a shopping trip,
over the breakfast table or anywhere people mutter darkly about 'bloody
foreigners' has far more effect than well-meaning, lefty-leaning education
policies. Should it come as any surprise that the thugs who dress themselves up
as politicians (Trump, Farage) find easy pickings in these all-too fertile
fields? I always thought that Hillary was the only Democratic candidate who
would lose to Trump, and sadly, I was right. These awful results will end up as
very tragic to the USA and the entire world. A narcissistic racist xenophobic
crotch grabbing con man with the nuclear code at his disposal. Remember what
happened in a certain European country less than a hundred years ago when a
little mustachioed corporal was blaming foreigners and minorities for the
nation's problem and ended up being voted into power by the "common
man"? Fortunately for the world, that man didn't have nuclear weapons,
this one does. Last but not least, I think the affluent educated liberalism has
neglected the very people they claim they speak for, the ordinary working
person, because this's not about race because non-Whites voted for Brexit and
Trump, it's not about sexism because women voted for Brexit and Trump, and it's
not about homophobia because non-heterosexual and non-cisgender people voted
for Trump (and probably for Brexit as well). I think the Western World should
stop living in denial and blaming white males; people generally are sick to the
teeth of having our political correctness rammed down our throat.

Welcome to Trump's Weltanschauung.

NB: The world
the US voters hankered after, is a world that is going to very difficult to live
for minorities, women, non-Christians, and well anyone who isn't male and
white, both inside and outside US borders. But all negative things also have
things on the plus side, and one of them is that Trump is less likely to
provoke a pointless war with Russia, that is for sure. The world is actually
safer...One last piece of free wisdom: I think Farage visited the USA during
election time (at least that’s what I’ve just heard on the tube; consequently,
he must have carried the stupidity virus over...

segunda-feira, novembro 07, 2016

In reply to some
questions from my “avid” and “eager” readers, I’m sure that yes, studying English
and German at a tender age did indeed seem an ‘exotic’ choice to a lot of
people at the time.I had already a go at this theme before, but I'll have another go just to press and clarify the point.

I remember a particular German class, because a friend of
mine dared me to attend the Goethe Institute; die Einstufungstest placed us both at the beginning (grade 0); a few years later
I’d finished the course and she didn’t (I've always been a stickler for hanging in there when the going gets tough). I first began learning about English (German),
its language, literature and culture in the early 80s (90s), when most of what
people here in the Portugal knew about England and Germany came from news
reports about what Thatcher said to Reagan (the demolition of the Berlin Wall when it comes to Germany), so not exactly a reliable indicator
of what most ordinary Portuguese were thinking and feeling. Back then, if you
were studying English/German it usually meant you’d end up working in the
tourism industry in one capacity or another or you became a teacher. My own
leanings were rather different – my heroes were Shakespeare, P. D. James, Philip
Larkin, Christopher Priest, T. S. Eliot, Waugh, Greene, Tolkien, Lewis, Le
Carré, Blake, George Eliot, etc. (Celan, Rilke, Hölderlin, Heine, Kafka, Trakl,
Goethe, Grass, etc.) I think it’s safe to say that my immersion in things English/German
either changed me completely or brought completely to the surface aspects of my
intellect and character that had always been there but that needed the
influence of the English and German spirit-stuff to set them free. There is
nothing to compare with language for getting a glimpse into another culture, and
another mode of thought. In a sense it is something that cannot be computed,
because so much is subtlety, and inclination. As well as English, I have always
felt a close affinity with German novelists and the German way of thinking. I'm, not sure why.

I also regret that I don’t know either
Japanese or Mandarin, because there are so many Japanese- and Chinese-language
writers I wish I could read at least a little of in their original language,
because I love the speculative cinema of Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and I
know I’d gain even more from these films if I could get a proper sense of how their
languages are structured.

It doesn’t
matter which language one chooses to learn; it will never be a waste of time.
Understanding a second (and third) language, even a little, will always broaden
one’s cultural horizons, and bring new inspirations. I’ve always claimed that reading
and writing in English and German freed me up to express thoughts and emotions
I would have felt uncertain or reserved about expressing in Portuguese. So I
would say this is a very particular decision that each trilingual (quadrilingual,
etc.) person has to make. The most important thing though is that this should
be a free choice; no one should come under pressure to write in Portuguese, English,
or German. Variety in terms of language should be cheered, encouraged and promoted
through adequate and skillful translations. That’s why when people ask me why I
write mainly in English and German and not in Portuguese, I just shrug my
shoulders and ignore them. The next time I’m asked the same question, instead of just saying: "sod off", I’ll just direct them to this post.
And That’s All Folks.

sábado, novembro 05, 2016

In my day job, once in a while, especially when
I’m getting my feet wet with a new client, I get emails from clients saying stuff
like this: “I’m really excited to have you
as my new Service Manager”. This is not much different when I get an
automatic response from an internet service that goes like: “Hmm, that’s not the right password. Please
try again or request a new one” (or something similar). I always assumed
“Hmm” was intended to make me think that the automated response was typed, in
real time, by a real Turing being – a being who is my pal and writes to me in a
conversational style, even using conversational interjections like “Hmm.” Ultimately
this is an insult to my “intelligence”. Although I only get slightly miffed
when I get responses like those above coming from a machine (or from a new
client...), I get real mad when I’m reading a book, wherein the writing is
histrionic, narcissistic, and bloated. And I’m not even talking about the
supposed “science” therein. I don’t know where this guy, Peter Sturrock, stands
when it comes to the authorship question, but after reading this drivel, I
think he takes sides with the likes of Derek Jakobi and Mark Rylance. I don’t
intend to dwell much on this, like I did the last time, but I’ve got to
say something about the math involved. Back in the day, I studied Statistics
and Probability, and we’ll knew it always came down to how well our assumptions
had to be properly graded, meaning that our levels of confidence had to match
our odds of exactitude. Am I supposed to believe Beatrice (one of the four
characters in the book) could really make ten trillion statements (10^ (-13) and
have only one of them be wrong? Even if she uses "Bayesian" methods? This
book is just so full of bullshit, it’s staggering! It promotes, among other
things, (equidistant) letter sequences, so popular in the 19th
century with those famous Shakespearean occultists like Ignatius L. Donnelly and
Orville Ward Owen; the latter even claimed to have discovered Bacon's
autobiography embedded in Shakespeare's plays… The Bayes model (the naïve kind)
hypothesizes that a body of items (book, newspaper, paper, etc.) is generated by
selecting a category for an item then generating the words of that item
independently based on a category-specific distribution. The bullshit in
question is in taking for granted the words are independent, a hypothesis
that’s clearly violated by natural language texts. Moreover, Sturrock’s
approach was doomed to fail, because it’s nigh on impossible to compare two
real "substantial" personalities (Shakespeare and Edward de Vere) with
a fictive unsubstantial "someone" else. I’d have liked to know the
result, if Sturrock had replaced "someone else" by Marlowe, for
example, using all the knowledge available today, and not by using mumbo-jumbo.
The book is a huge fallacy from beginning to end. I’d be able to forgive the
clunky and puerile prose, but the bad science not in a million years.

A few years ago I read a thing called “The
Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets”. I still have that book on my shelves. I opened
it again and I found this gem:

“When Phoebus from the
bed / Of Thetis doth arise, / The morning blushing red / In fair carnation wise,
/ He shows it in her face, / As queen of every grace.”

from “The Shepherd’s Commendation to His Nymph” by Edward de Vere.

Such clunkingly down-to-earth versifying surely
would've hit the waste-paper basket of the author of Hamlet, Macbeth, etc., not
to mention all those unfailingly fresh, inventive, powerful, yea sublime
sonnets.

sexta-feira, novembro 04, 2016

“There was a wall. It did not look important…But the
idea was real…Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it
and what was outside it depended upon the which side of it you were on”.

In “The
Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin

"Call me Shevek. Some
years ago, never mind how many, I set out to be the tedious, most hypocritical,
unreal character in all of fiction. That I failed is of little consequence. But
here, for your records is some of the bare facts of how I failed.

Manuel, Manuel, Manuel. I don't drink booze? But
I got drunk at a party, ejaculated all over a woman's dress (Did Bill Clinton
read my tale?) and then promptly threw up. Did you skip some of my story? I am
not amused! When I saw I was causing distress on page 75 to those very
different to myself, I stopped. Am I not sympathetic? I make jokes. 'You have
your anarchist. What are you going to do with him?' and so on...but I won't
dwell on the point. ;) And now having read the novel again after about 10
years, I am even fonder of it that I was back then. Chapter 5 is like a
distilled version of “The Brothers Karamazov” and the whole is a more serious,
thoughtful “Stranger in a Strange Land”.

So, yes, Manuel, Shevek
is quite like me in many ways, but since I've never had a single alcoholic
drink in my life, I am even more unreliable as a character!!

And so this orphan is
all alone without even a cardboard character to keep me company. ;)"

What you’ve read
above is what I wrote many eons ago after having going through the novel with a fine-tooth
comb. And I’ve just finished my third reading. Is it possible for a novel to
improve over time? It’s even better than the last two readings.

What has always
fascinated me about this novel is that Le Guin, instead of having chosen a
traveler to utopia, chose a citizen of utopia. Shevek is a cypher. I know, but
me as the reader I’m challenged to experience integrity and integration in the
novel’s images, structure, scientific novum,
and social relationships. It was one of the first novels wherein I got immersed
in the story even when I did not believe in Shevek as a character. The imagery
was (still is) so strong that Shevek’s shortcomings as a character are not
enough to diminish my enjoying of the novel. It was also one of the first
novels I read wherein the chronology of events was not told sequentially. Back
in the day, as a reader of SF, it was my first encounter with this narrative
device. It came as a shock. I understood there were people writing SF that
could write successfully by going at it differently. Le Guin’s alternate
storytelling between Shevek’s first years on Anarres and his single year on
Urras is nothing short of masterful. I can experience different periods in
Shevek’s life circling each other in my mind, each separate year integrated,
and exchanging roles of cause and effect. The first time I read the novel I was
also deeply impressed with Shevek’s attempts at developing a general temporal
theory combining the concepts of time and simultaneity (sic). At the time I was
already in college and Physics was present in my life on a daily basis (and
Einstein’s theory of relativity was also very much in my mind in particular).

Shevek’s
attempts at understanding his personal and social function in society and at
finding the theoretical foundation for the general temporal theory are depicted
as the familiar circular journey of discovery which Le Guin used in the
Earthsea novels, i.e., the journey outward at some point involves a return to
one’s origins before moving outward again.

“The
Dispossessed” is one of the novels that made me the way I’m today, for better
or worse. If one had any doubts concerning the existence of stuff with
transformative powers SF-wise, look no further. This is it.